Calendar
Wednesday
This Week's Video
Most Active Articles
The National Newsroom
The End of Blogging
What Gawker’s redesign says about the Web’s chattering class
Whatever blogs have become, there seems to be universal agreement that the format that made them ubiquitous—the reverse-chronological aggregation accompanied by commentary—is not long for this world, and Denton’s scoop-friendly redesign would seem to be the best evidence of that. In fact, the decline of the blog has come so quickly, one has to wonder whether we ever really liked the medium at all.
Read More »I Am Tweeting, Egypt, Tweeting
While social media can fuel a revolution, let’s not give it too much credit
Reading and listening to the immediate euphoric response to the protests in Egypt, I realized that America’s proverbial optimism and its legendary escapism were beginning to look more and more like each other.
Read More »The Power Booker
Katie Thomson is Piers Morgan’s new fixer
When The Observer met Katie Thomson at Landmarc restaurant in Columbus Circle, we wanted to congratulate her. We were beaten to it.
“Monica Lewinsky sent a note saying congratulations,” she said. Thomson, sipping green tea, was wrapping up her first week as the senior producer for Piers Morgan Tonight.
“She’s really lovely,” she added.
Lewinsky was a pivotal figure in Thomson’s career as a television booker and producer. Over the phone with Lewinsky’s lawyer in 1998, Thomson clinched the first interview with the presidential paramour for her boss at the time, Barbara Walters.
Read More »The Girlfriend Always Phones Twice
There’s sexting and then there’s SOSxting. Where to draw the line?
“Were you drinking for the entire flight?” Mr. Goody Two-Shoes asked as I deboarded my plane from Antigua. While he sounded vaguely amused as I slurred a denial, in my defense I had been through quite the ordeal.
Read More »Get your financial life in order one month at a time, Part 2
Here’s Part 2 of the month-by-month program to get your finances in order during the new year. Each step will probably take you less than an hour per month, but together they can lead to better investing, more effective financial planning and smarter saving in 2011. (See Part 1.)
Read More »Declawing the Tiger
Amy Chua’s controversial book on parenting is erratic, hypocritical and uninspired
No sooner had the blood dried in that Tucson, Ariz., parking lot and the body of 9-year-old Christina Green been lowered into the ground than “a large slice of educated America,” as David Brooks put it with his usual flair for evocative language, immediately switched its attention to one of the great issues of our day: Chinese parenting vs. American parenting.
Read More »Murder on the 34th Floor
A glamorous couple, a gruesome death and a horror that could only happen in Times Square
The murderer was very good-looking. As he walked into the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel around 6 p.m. on Jan. 7, he was freshly showered and wore a dark suit and a purple tie. Though by no means the only young European man to stride through the lobby that night, he must have turned a few heads.
Read More »Get your financial life in order one month at a time
Forget New Year’s resolutions. Most people break them by February anyway. If you want to get your financial life in order this year, resolve to do just one thing each month.
If you follow this program, you’ll find you’ve invested better, planned more effectively and saved money over the course of the year. And it should take you less than one hour of effort each month.
Read More »The Secret Scribe of AIG
Tom Russo saw the financial crisis unfold from a very high perch. Now, he’s put it all down on paper.
One of the most important people in finance was overlooking Central Park from his Fifth Avenue apartment, enjoying the Bach that his twin teenage daughters were playing on violin and speaking to the young Fulbright scholars from Iraq and China he’d invited for a reception. “In everything I do, I always ask myself, ‘Am I doing the best that I can?’” the host, Lehman Brothers vice chairman and chief legal officer Thomas Russo, told a New York Sun writer. “If you feel good about what you do, then you can be at peace with yourself.”
Read More »The Radiolab Effect
The public radio show has turned on a cult of young creatives to the poetry of science
Melissa Stanley went to school for music—or rather, Music Industry. The 26-year-old recalls “taking maybe one physics class in college, and that was it” for her formal science education. After graduation, she became a director of A&R and booking at Jezebel Music, a concert-promotion outfit for unsigned acts in Brooklyn. Then, at the office sometime in 2007, things changed. “One day,” she said, “we just got tired of all of the music that we had on our computers, so I turned on WNYC.” The program on the air was Radiolab.
Read More »